By day I’m an interlibrary loan bounty hunter for the Metropolitan Library System. By night I’m husband, father, and a student pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Sciences degree. In the space between I write, draw, and cope with a chronic condition of “hobbyism.” This means a lot of things interest me, and I engage in those interests with a bottomless well of enthusiasm that I draw from a pocket dimension using forbidden sorceries.

My bonafides include a BA in English literature with a focus on medieval romance; this is a fancy pants phrase for really old stories about questing knights, dragons, and ogres (oh my!) This book learnin’ has given me a vast arsenal of words and a fair grasp of how to put them together to make moving pictures in your brain computer. I write fantasy and sci-fi mostly but also dabble in essays and criticisms – you can take the kid out of the English department, but you can’t take the English department out of the kid.

FAQ-thingies:

What is House Johnston and this “Never Unprepared” thing?

You know how the houses in Game of Thrones have house words? Mottos such as, “Winter is coming, Ours is the Fury, We do not Sow,” etc? Well, that was a real on noble coats of arms in the Middle Ages. Several years ago, I discovered that my family name’s coat of arms had the phrase, “nunquam non paratus” written underneath. This translates to – you guessed it – Never Unprepared. It’s metal as shit, and I’ll own it, and it’s something that I strive toward (but fail at a lot.)

Related

My name is Brandon. I'm a writer, cartoonist, husband, and father. This is the online space where I talk about life, family, art, videogames, and anything else that interests me. Disclaimer: a lot of things interest me.

26Jan, 2016

January 2016 Check In

26Jan, 2016

January 2016 is coming to a close, and it’s already shaping up to be an interesting year.

Back in December I reconnected with an old friend who said he had some writing work if I was interested. Yes. Yes, I was. Last night I invoiced him for my 4th job. While it’s not the kind of creative writing that fulfills me the most, it’s a fun and challenging experience. Also, getting paid for words I write is pretty neat. Writing for someone else has gotten my own creative mojo flowing again. My original novel, which was never anything close to finished, is being rewritten from the ground up. I have an outline and everything.

Conversely, my lifestyle habits are in the toilet. I spent most of the month sick thanks to my own immunity failings and Ruu acting as a Trojan horse of disease. It’s hard to exercise when you can’t breathe. On top of this, my eating habits haven’t exactly been…disciplined. It’s something I need to work on.

We’ve also made it to mass on a regular and consistent basis, which feels good. There are many aspects of my own upbringing I want to pass on to Ruu, and one of them is that of being a practicing Catholic. This is kind of tricky because I’m not a good Catholic boy by traditional standards. Many of my personal beliefs don’t toe the Company line, and for a while it led to a disinterest in practicing religion. So why return? It’s a fair and good question. On a personal level, I believe that the structure of the Catholic church provides is a good foundation for spiritual and mental discipline that pretty much anyone can benefit from whether they believe in God or not. It gave me an essential set of tools to contemplate the universe. Those tools guided me in seeking the divine on my own terms without needing to rigidly adhere to archetypal stories (though, I find many of those useful as well.)

Also, I practice because I think the core message of Catholicism is on the right track: forgiveness, charity, love, community. Yes, this is the core of most non-violent religions, as well as any atheist or agnostic that isn’t horrible and cares about humanity and the world as a whole; but this is the one that fits me like an old, comfy pair of boots, so you’ll have to forgive my bias. The Catholic Church has many, many flaws, and I’m as ready to criticize it on what I see as its missteps and contradictions as any skeptic. The trap many fall into when trying to participate in the Science v. Religion discussion is in pretending that they’re these two disciplines are even having the same conversation, which they are not. Science, which deals in hard, tangible facts, is always self-critical. It’s always fact-checking itself. Religion has a harder time of things because it deals with intangible truths. It’s difficult to fact-check “meaning of life” stuff; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be critical of our belief systems and amend them when we see they do harm to or contradict our core message.

Without the self-critical aspect of religion–When religion does not develop the prophetic or self-critical function at the core of its message–it is always idolatrous. It will always worship itself.